Audigy 2 ZS notebook - Sound quality

You hit it on the head right there. I have found XMMS's EQ to be buggy sometimes and not work outright. Chances are this is happening to you as well. There are a few ways to get more bass depending on how much work you want to go through, but the easiest might be to find a known working EQ(Try VLC I believe I have better luck with that one) and see if that makes a difference. If you want something that aims for high quality sound, and dont mind some user interface difficulty at first while you learn it, you might wanna look at aqualung, and the route that through a plugin host in Jack(As aqualung has native support for Jack) and then out to your sound card. This would allow you to pick a LADSPA plugin to use on your music in the pluginhost and still give you the best quality audio they have gotten thus far. This takes a bit of work(Setting up Jack, Aqualung, etc) and would be more difficult at first, but could give you better quality as well if that is what you are after. Very likely. ALSA I believe can run multiple soundcards at once, and if both are running at once it is very likely this might be happening, check in the alsamixer or any other mixer program to see if they are doing anything first htough to make sure. Seablade

I use the audigy2 zx and the sound quality is very good under linux and I'm using pretty good headphones (Ultimate Ears UE-10pro). I've never had poor quality in any audio programs.

You might want to try beep media player. It's a lot like xmms, but a gtk+ app.